Introduction
by Keith Kahla
If the Golden Age of science fiction is fourteen, as the oft-misquoted saying goes, then John Varley was one of the most important, most influential writers of my own personal Golden Age. As I remember it, I ran across Varley’s story “Retrograde Summer” [F&SF, February 1975] in one of Terry Carr’s annual Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies at the local library—which, like a lot of my memories from my teenage years, might or might not be accurate. What I can vouch for is that the first-person narrative voice of this story grabbed my attention immediately. “He” (gender, after all, can be a slippery concept in a Varley story) wasn’t like the other, all-too-rare adolescent characters in science fiction that I’d previously come across. While other writers (some, at least) had created characters that were interesting, well-developed, admirable, and even compelling, what Timothy in “Retrograde Summer” had over all of them was that to my teenaged reader’s mind, he felt real.
Not TV-real. Not sf-real.
Real.
Varley’s characters, particularly those first-person narrators of his shorter fiction, had an easy complexity that flowed out from between the lines of the story. There was an emotional reality to those characters that mirrored much of my own (then ongoing) experience of adolescence. While my peers—those who actually read books, that is—found themselves engrossed in the conventionally unconventional teenaged angst in the books of Paul Zindel and S. E. Hinton and others of that ilk, the characters in these books didn’t speak to, or for, me. I had John Varley’s characters to express and define that contradictory mix of desires and fears by which I, like nearly every adolescent male, felt uniquely plagued. And, starting with “Retrograde Summer,” Varley led me to other stories, other writers, other ideas, and, ultimately, other people who got me through adolescence and young adulthood in something close enough to one piece.
While Varley meant the most to me for his characters, that doesn’t mean that was all there was to his writing. “Retrograde Summer” is packed with ideas—some scientific, many sociological—that shook my unquestioned preconceptions of “how things are.” These ideas are mostly just tossed off casually and are then unremarked upon, a mind-numbingly different view of “how things are” in these characters’ reality. For those for whom science fiction is all about ideas—well, worry not, they are here in abundance. (For those for whom story is the primary concern in fiction reading, this one might be a bit slight. I’d argue that it’s subtle rather than slight, but you might be more pleased with another of Varley’s stories, such as “Press Enter[],” “In the Hall of the Martian Kings,” or “The Barbie Murders.”)
When Gordon Van Gelder kindly asked if I’d like to pick a story and introduce it for this anniversary year of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I hadn’t read “Retrograde Summer” in coming on three decades. And I was a little leery of rereading it. It’s dangerous to revisit the favorite stories of one’s youth, because so many fail to live up to the memory of them. (Think I’m kidding? Those of you who loved it, go out and reread The Catcher in the Rye—particularly if it’s been a couple of decades or more. I’ll wait while you read.... See? Instead of being the voice of truth in an uncaring world filled with phonies and sellouts, Holden Caulfield is now an obnoxious punk whom you want nothing more than to strangle every time he talks! The writing hasn’t changed—Salinger is every bit the superb writer you remember—but your perspective on his main character has.) “Retrograde Summer,” however, held up to my memory of it quite nicely. In fact, it’s better than I ever knew at the time. Varley can do as much with an unconventional family, their dynamic, and their secrets in a handful of pages as Eugene O’Neill could in an evening. It’s a gem of a story, unjustly overlooked, I would argue, in favor of other equally impressive stories by one of the finest writers yet to work within the genre.
—Keith Kahla
* * * *
Retrograde Summer by John Varley
I was at the spaceport an hour early on the day my clone-sister was to arrive from Luna. Part of it was eagerness to see her. She was three E-years older than me, and we had never met. But I admit that I grab every chance I can get to go to the port and just watch the ships arrive and depart. I’ve never been off-planet. Someday I’ll go, but not as a paying passenger. I was about to enroll in pilot-training school.
Keeping my mind on the arrival time of the shuttle from Luna was hard, because my real interest was in the liners departing for all the far-off places in the system. On that very day the Elizabeth Browning was lifting off on a direct, high-gee run for Pluto, with connections for the cometary zone. She was sitting on the field a few kilometers from me, onboarding passengers and freight. Very little of the latter.
The Browning was a luxury-class ship, where you paid a premium fare to be sealed into a liquid-filled room, doped to the gills and fed through a tube for the five-gee express run. Nine days later, at wintertime Pluto, they decanted you and put you through ten hours of physical rehabilitation. You could have made it in fourteen days at two gees and only have been mildly uncomfortable, but maybe it’s worth it to some people. I had noticed that the Browning was never crowded.
I might not have noticed the arrival of the Lunar shuttle, but the tug was lowering it between me and the Browning. They were berthing it in Bay Nina, a recessed area a few hundred meters from where I was standing. So I ducked into the tunnel that would take me there.
I arrived in time to see the tug cut the line and shoot into space to meet the next incoming ship. The Lunar shuttle was a perfectly reflective sphere sitting in the middle of the landing bay. As I walked up to it, the force field roof sprang into being over the bay, cutting off the summertime sunlight. The air started rushing in, and in a few minutes my suit turned off. I was suddenly sweating, cooking in the heat that hadn’t been dissipated as yet. My suit had cut off too soon again. I would have to have that checked. Meantime, I did a little dance to keep my bare feet away from the too-hot concrete.
When the air temperature reached the standard twenty-four degrees, the field around the shuttle cut off. What was left behind was an insubstantial latticework of decks and bulkheads, with people gawking out of the missing outer walls of their rooms.
I joined the crowd of people clustered around the ramp. I had seen a picture of my sister, but it was an old one. I wondered if I’d recognize her.
There was no trouble. I spotted her at the head of the ramp, dressed in a silly-looking loonie frock coat and carrying a pressurized suitcase. I was sure it was her because she looked just like me, more or less, except that she was a female and she was frowning. She might have been a few centimeters taller than me, but that was from growing up in a lower gravity field. I pushed my way over to her and took her case.
“Welcome to Mercury,” I said, in my friendliest manner. She looked me over. 1 don’t know why, but she took an instant dislike to me, or so it seemed. Actually, she had disliked me before we ever met.
“You must be Timmy,” she said. I couldn’t let her get away with that. There are limits.
“Timothy. And you’re my sister, Jew.”
“Jubilant.”
We were off to a great start. She looked around her at the bustle of people in the landing bay. Then she looked overhead at the flat-black underside of the force-roof and seemed to shrink away from it.
“Where can I rent a suit?” she asked. “I’d like to get one installed before you have a blowout here.”
“It isn’t that bad,” I said. “We do have them more often here than you do in Luna, but it can’t be helped.” I started off in the direction of General Environments, and she fell in beside me. She was having difficulty walking. I’d hate to be a loonie; just about anywhere they go, they’re too heavy.
“I was reading on the trip that you had a blowout here at the port only four lunations ago.”
I don’t know why, but I felt defensive. I mean, sure we have blowouts here, but you can hardly blame us for them. Mercury has a lot of tidal stresses; that means a lot of quakes. Any system will break down if you shake it around enough.
“All right,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. “It happens I was here during that one. It was in the middle of the last dark year. We lost pressure in about ten percent of the passages, but it was restored in a few minutes. No lives were lost.”
“A few minutes is more than enough to kill someone without a suit, isn’t it?” How could I answer that? She seemed to think she had won a point. “So I’ll feel a lot better when I get into one of your suits.”
“Okay, let’s get a suit into you.” I was trying to think of something to restart the conversation and drawing a blank. Somehow she seemed to have a low opinion of our environmental engineers on Mercury and was willing to take her contempt out on me.
“What are you training for?” I ventured. “You must be out of school. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to be an environmental engineer.”
“Oh.”
* * * *
I was relieved when they finally had her lie on the table, made the connection from the computer into the socket at the back of her head, and turned off her motor control and sensorium. The remainder of the trip to GE had been a steady lecture about the shortcomings of the municipal pressure service in Mercury Port. My head was swimming with facts about quintuple-redundant failless pressure sensors, self-sealing locks, and blowout drills. I’m sure we have all those things, and just as good as the ones in Luna. But the best anyone can do with the quakes shaking everything up a hundred times a day is achieve a ninety-nine percent safety factor. Jubilant had sneered when I trotted out that figure. She quoted one to me with fifteen decimal places, all of them nines. That was the safety factor in Luna.
I was looking at the main reason why we didn’t need that kind of safety, right in the surgeon’s hands. He had her chest opened up and the left lung removed, and he was placing the suit generator into the cavity. It looked pretty much like the lung he had removed except it was made of metal and had a mirror finish. He hooked it up to her trachea and the stump ends of the pulmonary arteries and did some adjustments. Then he closed her and applied somatic sealant to the incisions. In thirty minutes she would be ready to wake up, fully healed. The only sign of the operation would be the gold button of the intake valve under her left collarbone. And if the pressure were to drop by two millibars in the next instant, she would be surrounded by the force field that is a Mercury suit. She would be safer than she had ever been in her life, even in the oh-so-safe warrens in Luna.
The surgeon made the adjustment in my suit’s brain while Jubilant was still out. Then he installed the secondary items in her; the pea-sized voder in her throat so she could talk without inhaling and exhaling, and the binaural radio receptors in her middle ears. Then he pulled the plug out of her brain, and she sat up. She seemed a little more friendly. An hour of sensory deprivation tends to make you more open and relaxed when you come out of it. She started to get back into her loonie coat.
“That’ll just burn off when you go outside,” I pointed out.
“Oh, of course. I guess I expected to go by tunnel. But you don’t have many tunnels here, do you?”
You can’t keep them pressurized, can you?
I really was beginning to feel defensive about our engineering.
* * * *
“The main trouble you’ll have is adjusting to not breathing.”
We were at the west portal, looking through the force-curtain that separated us from the outside. There was a warm breeze drifting away from the curtain, as there always is in summertime. It was caused by the heating of the air next to the curtain by the wavelengths of light that are allowed to pass through so we can see what’s outside. It was the beginning of retrograde summer, when the sun backtracks at the zenith and gives us a triple helping of very intense light and radiation. Mercury Port is at one of the hotspots, where retrograde sun motion coincides with solar noon. So even though the force-curtain filtered out all but a tiny window of visible light, what got through was high-powered stuff.
“Is there any special trick I should know?”
I’ll give her credit; she wasn’t any kind of fool; she was just overcritical. When it came to the operation of her suit, she was completely willing to concede that I was the expert.
“Not really. You’ll feel an overpowering urge to take a breath after a few minutes, but it’s all psychological. Your blood will be oxygenated. It’s just that your brain won’t feel right about it. But you’ll get over it. And don’t try to breathe when you talk. Just subvocalize, and the radio in your throat will pick it up.”
I thought about it and decided to throw in something else, free of charge.
“If you’re in the habit of talking to yourself, you’d better try to break yourself of it. Your voder will pick it up if you mutter, or sometimes if you just think too loud. Your throat moves sometimes when you do that, you know. It can get embarrassing.”
She grinned at me, the first time she had done it. I found myself liking her. I had always wanted to, but this was the first chance she had given me.
“Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind. Shall we go?”
I stepped out first. You feel nothing at all when you step through a force-curtain. You can’t step through it at all unless you have a suit generator installed, but with it turned on, the field just forms around your body as you step through. I turned around and could see nothing but a perfectly flat, perfectly reflective mirror. It bulged out as I watched in the shape of a nude woman, and the bulge separated from the curtain. What was left was a silver-plated Jubilant.
The suit generator causes the field to follow the outlines of your body, but from one to one and a half millimeters from the skin. It oscillates between those limits, and the changing volume means a bellows action forces the carbon dioxide out through your intake valve. You expel waste gas and cool yourself in one operation. The field is perfectly reflective except for two pupil-sized discontinuities that follow your eye movements and let in enough light to see by, but not enough to blind you.
“What happens if I open my mouth?” she mumbled. It takes a while to get the knack of subvocalizing clearly.
“Nothing. The field extends over your mouth, like it does over your nostrils. It won’t go down your throat.”
A few minutes later: “I sure would like to take a breath.” She would get over it. “Why is it so hot?”
“Because at the most efficient setting your suit doesn’t release enough carbon dioxide to cool you down below about thirty degrees. So you’ll sweat a bit.”
“It feels like thirty-five or forty.”
“It must be your imagination. You can change the setting by turning the nozzle of your air valve, but that means your tank will be releasing some oxygen with the CO2, and you never know when you’ll need it.”
“How much of a reserve is there?”
“You’re carrying forty-eight hours’ worth. Since the suit releases oxygen directly into your blood, we can use about ninety-five percent of it, instead of throwing most of it away to cool you off, like your loonie suits do.” I couldn’t resist that one.
“The term is Lunarian,” she said, icily. Oh, well. I hadn’t even known the term was derogatory.
“I think I’ll sacrifice some margin for comfort now. I feel bad enough as it is in this gravity without stewing in my own sweat.”
“Suit yourself. You’re the environment expert.”
She looked at me, but I don’t think she was used to reading expressions on a reflective face. She turned the nozzle that stuck out above her left breast, and the flow of steam from it increased.
“That should bring you down to about twenty degrees, and leave you with about thirty hours of oxygen. That’s under ideal conditions, of course; sitting down and keeping still. The more you exert yourself, the more oxygen the suit wastes keeping you cool.”
She put her hands on her lips. “Timothy, are you telling me that I shouldn’t cool off? I’ll do whatever you say.”
“No, I think you’ll be all right. It’s a thirty-minute trip to my house. And what you say about the gravity has merit; you probably need the relief. But I’d turn it up to twenty-five as a reasonable compromise.”
She silently readjusted the valve.
* * * *
Jubilant thought it was silly to have a traffic conveyor that operated in two-kilometer sections. She complained to me the first three or four times we got off the end of one and stepped onto another. She shut up about it when we came to a section knocked out by a quake. We had a short walk between sections of the temporary slideway, and she saw the crews working to bridge the twenty-meter gap that had opened beneath the old one.
We only had one quake on the way home. It didn’t amount to anything; just enough motion that we had to do a little dance to keep our feet under us. Jubilant didn’t seem to like it much. I wouldn’t have noticed it at all, except Jubilant yelped when it hit.
* * * *
Our house at that time was situated at the top of a hill. We had carried it up there after the big quake seven darkyears before that had shaken down the cliffside where we used to live. I had been buried for ten hours in that one—the first time I ever needed digging out. Mercurians don’t like living in valleys. They have a tendency to fill up with debris during the big quakes. If you live at the top of a rise, you have a better chance of being near the top of the rubble when it slides down. Besides, my mother and I both liked the view.
Jubilant liked it, too. She made her first comment on the scenery as we stood outside the house and looked out over the valley we had just crossed. Mercury Port was sitting atop the ridge, thirty kilometers away. At that distance you could just make out the hemispherical shape of the largest buildings.
But Jubilant was more interested in the mountains behind us. She pointed to a glowing violet cloud that rose from behind one of the foothills and asked me what it was.
“That’s quicksilver grotto. It always looks like that at the start of retrograde summer. I’ll take you over there later. I think you’ll like it.”
Dorothy greeted us as we stepped through the wall.
I couldn’t put my finger on what was bothering Mom. She seemed happy enough to see Jubilant after seventeen years. She kept saying inane things about how she had grown and how pretty she looked. She had us stand side by side and pointed out how much we looked like each other. It was true, of course, since we were genetically identical. She was five centimeters taller than me, but she could lose that in a few months in Mercury’s gravity.
“She looks just like you did two years ago, before your last Change,” she told me. That was a slight misstatement; I hadn’t been quite as sexually mature the last time I was a female. But she was right in essence. Both Jubilant and I were genotypically male, but Mom had had my sex changed when I first came to Mercury, when I was a few months old. I had spent the first fifteen years of my life female. I was thinking of Changing back, but wasn’t in a hurry.
“You’re looking well yourself, Glitter,” Jubilant said.
Mom frowned for an instant. “It’s Dorothy now, honey. I changed my name when we moved here. We use Old Earth names on Mercury.”
“I’m sorry, I forgot. My mother always used to call you Glitter when she spoke of you. Before she, I mean before I....”
There was an awkward silence. I felt like something was being concealed from me, and my ears perked up. I had high hopes of learning some things from Jubilant, things that Dorothy had never told me no matter how hard I prodded her. At least I knew where to start in drawing Jubilant out.
It was a frustrating fact at that time that I knew little of the mystery surrounding how I came to grow up on Mercury instead of in Luna, and why I had a clone-sister. Having a clone twin is a rare enough thing that it was inevitable I’d try to find out how it came to pass. It wasn’t socially debilitating, like having a fraternal sibling or something scandalous like that. But I learned early not to mention it to my friends. They wanted to know how it happened, how my mom managed to get around the laws that forbid that kind of unfair preference. One Person, One Child: that’s the first moral lesson any child learns, even before Thou Shalt Not Take a Life. Mom wasn’t in jail, and so it must have been legal. But how? And why? She wouldn’t talk, but maybe Jubilant would.
* * * *
Dinner was eaten in a strained silence, interrupted by awkward attempts at conversation. Jubilant was suffering from culture shock and an attack of nerves. I could understand it, looking around me with her eyes. Loonies, pardon me, Lunarians, live all their lives in burrows down in the rock and come to need the presence of solid, substantial walls around them. They don’t go outside much. When they do, they are wrapped in a steel and plastic cocoon that they can feel around them, and they look out of it through a window. She was feeling terribly exposed and trying to be brave about it. When inside a force-bubble house, you might as well be sitting on a flat platform under the blazing sun. The bubble is invisible from the inside.
When I realized what was bothering her, I turned up the polarization. Now the bubble looked like tinted glass.
“Oh, you needn’t,” she said, gamely. “I have to get used to it. I just wish you had walls somewhere I could look at.”
It was more apparent than ever that something was upsetting Dorothy. She hadn’t noticed Jubilant’s unease, and that’s not like her. She should have had some curtains rigged to give our guest a sense of enclosure.
I did learn some things from the intermittent conversation at the table. Jubilant had divorced her mother when she was ten E-years old, an absolutely extraordinary age. The only grounds for divorce at that age are really incredible things like insanity of religious evangelism. 1 didn’t know much about Jubilant’s foster mother—not even her name—but I did know that she and Dorothy had been good friends back in Luna. Somehow, the question of how and why Dorothy had abandoned her child and taken me, a chip off the block, to Mercury, was tied up in that relationship.
“We could never get close, as far back as I can remember,” Jubilant was saying. “She told me crazy things, she didn’t seem to fit in. I can’t really explain it, but the court agreed with me. It helped that I had a good lawyer.”
“Maybe part of it was the unusual relationship,” I said, helpfully. “You know what I mean. It isn’t all that common to grow up with a foster mother, instead of your real mother.” That was greeted with such a dead silence that I wondered if I should just shut up for the rest of dinner. There were meaningful glances exchanged.
“Yes, that might have been part of it. Anyway, within three years of your leaving for Mercury. I knew I couldn’t take it. I should have gone with you. I was only a child, but even then I wanted to come with you.” She looked appealingly at Dorothy, who was studying the table. Jubilant had stopped eating.
“Maybe I’d better not talk about it.”
To my surprise, Dorothy agreed. That cinched it for me. They wouldn’t talk about it because they were keeping something from me.
* * * *
Jubilant took a nap after dinner. She said she wanted to go to the grotto with me but had to rest from the gravity. While she slept I tried once more to get Dorothy to tell me the whole story of her life on the moon.
“But why am I alive at all? You say you left Jubilant, your own child, three years old, with a friend who would take care of her in Luna. Didn’t you want to take her with you?”
She looked at me tiredly. We’d been over this ground before.
“Timmy, you’re an adult now, and have been for three years. I’ve told you that you’re free to leave me if you want. You will soon, anyway. But I’m not going into it any further.”
“Mom, you know I can’t insist. But don’t you have enough respect for me not to keep feeding me that story? There’s more behind it.”
“Yes! Yes, there is more behind it. But I prefer to let it lie in the past. It’s a matter of personal privacy. Don’t you have enough respect for me to stop grilling me about it?” I had never seen her this upset. She got up and walked through the wall and down the hill. Halfway down, she started to run. I started after her, but came back after a few steps. I didn’t know what I’d say to her that hadn’t already been said.
* * * *
We made it to the grotto in easy stages. Jubilant was feeling much better after her rest, but still had trouble on some of the steep slopes.
I hadn’t been to the grotto for four light-years and hadn’t played in it for longer than that. But it was still a popular place with the kids. There were scores of them.
We stood on a narrow ledge overlooking the quicksilver pool, and this time Jubilant was really impressed. The quicksilver pool is at the bottom of a narrow gorge that was blocked off a long time ago by a quake. One side of the gorge is permanently in shade, because it faces north and the sun never gets that high in our latitude. At the bottom of the gorge is the pool; twenty meters across, a hundred meters long, and about five meters deep. We think it’s that deep, but just try sounding a pool of mercury. A lead weight sinks through it like thick molasses, and just about everything else floats. The kids had a fair-sized boulder out in the middle, using it for a boat.
That’s all pretty enough, but this was retrograde summer, and the temperature was climbing toward the maximum. So the mercury was near the boiling point, and the whole area was thick with the vapor. When the streams of electrons from the sun passed through the vapor, it lit up, flickering and swirling in a ghostly indigo storm. The level was down, but it would never all boil away because it kept condensing on the dark cliffside and running back into the pool.
“Where does it all come from?” Jubilant asked, when she got her breath.
“Some of it’s natural, but the majority comes from the factories in the port. It’s a byproduct of some of the fusion processes that they can’t find any use for, and so they release it into the environment. It’s too heavy to drift away, and so during darkyear, it condenses in the valleys. This one is especially good for collecting it. I used to play here when I was younger.”
She was impressed. There’s nothing like it on Luna. From what I hear, Luna is plain dull on the outside. Nothing moves for billions of years.
“I never saw anything so pretty. What do you do in it, though? Surely it’s too dense to swim in?”
“Truer words were never spoken. It’s all you can do to force your hand half a meter into the stuff. If you could balance, you could stand on it and sink in just about fifteen centimeters. But that doesn’t mean you can’t swim, you swim on it. Come on down, I’ll show you.”
She was still gawking at the ionized cloud, but she followed me. That cloud can hypnotize you. At first you think it’s all purple; then you start seeing other colors out of the corners of your eyes. You can never see them plainly, they’re too faint. But they’re there. It’s caused by local impurities of other gases.
I understand people used to make lamps using ionized gases: neon, argon, mercury, and so forth. Walking down into quicksilver gully is exactly like walking into the glow of one of those old lamps.
Halfway down the slope, Jubilant’s knees gave way. Her suit field stiffened with the first impact when she landed on her behind and started to slide. She was a rigid statue by the time she plopped into the pool, frozen into an awkward posture trying to break her fall. She slid across the pool and came to rest on her back.
I dived onto the surface of the pool and was easily carried all the way across to her. She was trying to stand up and finding it impossible. Presently she began to laugh, realizing that she must look pretty silly.
“There’s no way you’re going to stand up out here. Look, here’s how you move.” I flipped over on my belly and started moving my arms in a swimming motion. You start with them in front of you, and bring them back to your sides in a long circular motion. The harder you dig into the mercury, the faster you go. And you keep going until you dig your toes in. The pool is frictionless.
Soon she was swimming along beside me, having a great time. Well, so was I. Why is it that we stop doing so many fun things when we grow up? There’s nothing in the solar system like swimming on mercury. It was coming back to me now, the sheer pleasure of gliding along on the mirror-bright surface with your chin plowing up a wake before you. With your eyes just above the surface, the sensation of speed is tremendous.
Some of the kids were playing hockey. I wanted to join them, but I could see from the way they eyed us that we were too big and they thought we shouldn’t be out here in the first place. Well, that was just tough. I was having too much fun swimming.
After several hours, Jubilant said she wanted to rest. I showed her how it could be done without going to the side, forming a tripod by sitting with your feet spread wide apart. That’s about the only thing you can do except lie flat. Any other position causes your support to slip out from under you. Jubilant was content to lie flat.
“I still can’t get over being able to look right at the sun,” she said. “I’m beginning to think you might have the better system here. With the internal suits, I mean.”
“I thought about that,” I said. “You loo ... Lunarians don’t spend enough time on the surface to make a force-suit necessary. It’d be too much trouble and expense, especially for children. You wouldn’t believe what it costs to keep a child in suits. Dorothy won’t have her debts paid off for twenty years.”
“Yes, but it might be worth it. Oh, I can see you’re right that it would cost a lot, but I won’t be outgrowing them. How long do they last?”
“They should be replaced every two or three years.” I scooped up a handful of mercury and let it dribble through my hands and onto her chest. I was trying to think of an indirect way to get the talk onto the subject of Dorothy and what Jubilant knew about her. After several false starts, I came right out and asked her what they had been trying not to say.
She wouldn’t be drawn out.
“What’s in that cave over there?” she asked, rolling over on her belly.
“That’s the grotto.”
“What’s in it?”
“I’ll show you if you’ll talk.”
She gave me a look. “Don’t be childish, Timothy. If your mother wants you to know about her life in Luna, she’ll tell you. It’s not my business.”
“I won’t be childish if you’ll stop treating me like a child. We’re both adults. You can tell me whatever you want without asking my mother.”
“Let’s drop the subject.”
“That’s what everyone tells me. All right, go on up to the grotto by yourself.” And she did just that. I sat on the lake and glowered at everything. I don’t enjoy being kept in the dark, and I especially don’t like having my relatives talk around me.
I was just a little bemused to find out how important it had become to find out the real story of Dorothy’s trip to Mercury. I had lived seventeen years without knowing, and it hadn’t harmed me. But now that I had thought about the things she told me as a child, I saw that they didn’t make sense. Jubilant arriving here had made me reexamine them. Why did she leave Jubilant in Luna? Why take a cloned infant instead?
* * * *
The grotto is a cave at the head of the gully with a stream of quicksilver flowing from its mouth. That happens all light-year, but the stream gets more substantial during the height of summer. It’s caused by the mercury vapor concentrating in the cave, where it condenses and drips off the walls. I found Jubilant sitting in the center of a pool, entranced. The ionization glow in the cave seems much brighter than outside, where it has to compete with sunlight. Add to that the thousands of trickling streams of mercury throwing back reflections, and you have a place that has to be entered to be believed.
“Listen, I’m sorry I was pestering you. I....”
“Shhh.” She waved her hands at me. She was watching the drops fall from the roof to splash without a ripple into the isolated pools on the floor of the cave. So I sat beside her and watched it, too.
“I don’t think I’d mind living here,” she said, after what might have been an hour.
“I guess I never really considered living anywhere else.”
She faced me, but turned away again. She wanted to read my face, but all she could see was the distorted reflection of her own.
“I thought you wanted to be a ship’s captain.”
“Oh, sure. But I’d always come back here.” I was silent for another few minutes, thinking about something that had bothered me more and more lately.
“Actually, I might get into another line of work.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I guess commanding a spaceship isn’t what it used to be. You know what I mean?”
She looked at me again, this time tried even harder to see my face.
“Maybe I do.”
“I know what you’re thinking. Lots of kids want to be ship’s captains. They grow out of it. Maybe I have. I think I was born a century too late for what I want. You can hardly find a ship anymore where the captain is much more than a figurehead. The real master of the ship is a committee of computers. They handle all the work. The captain can’t even overrule them anymore.”
“I wasn’t aware it had gotten that bad.”
“Worse. All of the passenger lines are shifting over to totally automated ships. The high-gee runs are already like that, on the theory that after a dozen trips at five gees, the crew is pretty much used up.”
I pondered a sad fact of our modern civilization: The age of romance was gone. The solar system was tamed. There was no place for adventure.
“You could go to the cometary zone,” she suggested.
“That’s the only thing that’s kept me going toward pilot training. You don’t need a computer out there hunting for black holes. I thought about getting a job and buying passage last darkyear, when I was feeling really low about it. But I’m going to try to get some pilot training before I go.”
“That might be wise.”
“I don’t know. They’re talking about ending the courses in astrogation. I may have to teach myself.”
* * * *
“You think we should get going? I’m getting hungry.”
“No. Let’s stay here a while longer. I love this place.”
I’m sure we had been there for five hours, saying very little. I had asked her about her interest in environmental engineering and gotten a surprisingly frank answer. This was what she had to say about her chosen profession: “I found after I divorced my mother that I was interested in making safe places to live. I didn’t feel very safe at that time.” She found other reasons later, but she admitted that it was a need for security that still drove her. I meditated on her strange childhood. She was the only person I ever knew who didn’t grow up with her natural mother.
“I was thinking about heading outsystem myself,” she said after another long silence. “Pluto, for instance. Maybe we’ll meet out there someday.”
“It’s possible.”
There was a little quake; not much, but enough to start the pools of mercury quivering and make Jubilant ready to go. We were threading our way through the pools when there was a long, rolling shock, and the violet glow died away. We were knocked apart, and fell in total darkness.
“What was that?” There was the beginning of panic in her voice. “It looks like we’re blocked in. There must have been a slide over the entrance. Just sit tight and I’ll find you.”
“Where are you?”
“I can’t find you. Timothy!”
“Just hold still and I’ll run into you in a minute. Stay calm, just stay calm, there’s nothing to worry about. They’ll have us out in a few hours.”
“Timothy, I can’t find you, I can’t....” She smacked me across the face with one of her hands, then was swarming all over me. I held her close and soothed her. Earlier in the day I might have been contemptuous of her behavior, but I had come to understand her better. Besides, no one likes to be buried alive. Not even me. I held her until I felt her relax.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, I felt the same way the first time. I’m glad you’re here. Being buried alone is much worse than just being buried alive. Now sit down, and do what I tell you. Turn your intake valve all the way to the left. Got it? Now we’re using oxygen at the slowest possible rate. We have to keep as still as possible so we don’t heat up too much.”
“All right. What next?”
“Well, for starters, do you play chess?”
“What? Is that all? Don’t we have to turn on a signal or something?
“I already did.”
“What if you’re buried solid and your suit freezes to keep you from being crushed? How do you turn it on then?”
“It turns on automatically if the suit stays rigid for more than one minute.”
“Oh. All right. Pawn to king four.”
* * * *
We gave up on the game after the fifteenth move. I’m not that good at visualizing the board, and while she was excellent at it, she was too nervous to plan her game. And I was getting nervous. If the entrance was blocked with rubble as I had thought, they should have had us out in under an hour. I had practiced estimating time in the dark and made it to be two hours since the quake. It must have been bigger than I thought. It could be a full day before they got around to us.
“I was surprised when you hugged me that I could touch you. I mean your skin, not your suit.”
“I thought I felt you jump. The suits merge. When you touch me, we’re wearing one suit instead of two. That comes in handy, sometimes.”
We were lying side by side in a pool of mercury, arms around each other. We found it soothing.
“You mean ... I see. You can make love with your suit on. Is that what you’re saying?”
“You should try it in a pool of mercury. That’s the best way.”
“We’re in a pool of mercury.”
“And we don’t dare make love. It would overheat us. We might need our reserve.”
She was quiet, but I felt her hands tighten behind my back. “Are we in trouble, Timothy?”
“No, but we might be in for a long stay. You’ll get thirsty by and by. Can you hold out?”
“It’s too bad we can’t make love. It would have kept my mind off it.”
“Can you hold out?”
“I can hold out.”
* * * *
“Timothy. I didn’t fill my tank before we left the house. Will that make a difference?”
I don’t think I tensed, but she scared me badly. I thought about it, and didn’t see how it mattered. She had used an hour’s oxygen at most getting to the house, even at her stepped-up cooling rate. I suddenly remembered how cool her skin had been when she came into my arms.
“Jubilant, was your suit set at maximum cooling when you left the house?”
“No, but I set it up on the way. It was so hot. I was about to pass out from the exertion.”
“And you didn’t turn it down until the quake?”
“That’s right.”
I did some rough estimations and didn’t like the results. By the most pessimistic assumptions, she might not have more than about five hours of air left. At the outside, she might have twelve hours. And she could do simple arithmetic as well as I; there was no point in trying to hide it from her.
“Come closer to me,” I said. She was puzzled, because we were already about as close as we could get. But I wanted to get our intake valves together. I hooked them up and waited three seconds.
“Now our tank pressures are equalized.”
“Why did you do that? Oh, no, Timothy, you shouldn’t have. It was my own fault for not being careful.”
“I did it for me, too. How could I live with myself if you died in here and I could have saved you? Think about that.”
* * * *
“Timothy, I’ll answer any question you want to ask about your mother.”
That was the first time she got me mad. I hadn’t been angry at her oversight with the refilling of the tank. Not even about the cooling. That was more my fault than hers. I had made it a game about the cooling rate, not really telling her how important it was to maintain a viable reserve. She hadn’t taken me seriously, and now we were paying for my little joke. I had made the mistake of assuming that because she was an expert at Lunar safety, she could take care of herself. How could she do that if she didn’t have a realistic estimate of the dangers?
But this offer sounded like repayment for the oxygen, and you don’t do that on Mercury. In a tight spot, air is always shared freely. Thanks are rude.
“Don’t think you owe me anything. It isn’t right.”
“That’s not why I offered. If we’re going to die down here, it seems silly for me to be keeping secrets. Does that make sense?”
“No. If we’re going to die, what’s the use in telling me? What good will it do me? And that doesn’t make sense, either. We’re not even near dying.”
“It would at least be something to pass the time.”
I sighed. At that time, it really wasn’t important to know what I had been trying to learn from her.
“All right. Question one: Why did Dorothy leave you behind when she came here?” Once I had asked it, the question suddenly became important again.
“Because she’s not our mother. I divorced our mother when I was ten.”
I sat up, shocked silly.
“Dorothy’s not ... then she’s ... she’s my foster mother? All this time she said she was....”
“No, she’s not your foster mother, not technically. She’s your father.”
“WHAT?”
“She’s your father.”
“Who the hell ... father? What kind of crazy game is this? Who the hell ever knows who their father is?”
“I do,” she said, simply. “And now you do.”
“I think you had better tell it from the top.”
She did, and it all stood up, bizarre as it was.
Dorothy and Jubilant’s mother (my mother!) had been members of a religious sect called the First Principles. I gathered they had a lot of screwy ideas, but the screwiest one of all had to do with something called the “nuclear family.” I don’t know why they called it that, maybe because it was invented in the era when nuclear power was first harnessed. What it consisted of was a mother and a father, both living in the same household, and dozens of kids.
The First Principles didn’t go that far; they still adhered to the One Person-One Child convention—and a damn good thing, too, or they might have been lynched instead of queasily tolerated—but they liked the idea of both biological parents living together to raise the two children.
So Dorothy and Gleam (that was her name; they were Glitter and Gleam back in Luna) “married,” and Gleam took on the female role for the first child. She conceived it, birthed it, and named it Jubilant.
Then things started to fall apart, as any sane person could have told them it would. I don’t know much history, but I know a little about the way things were back on Old Earth. Husbands killing wives, wives killing husbands, parents beating children, wars, starvation; all those things. I don’t know how much of that was the result of the nuclear family, but it must have been tough to “marry” someone and find out too late that it was the wrong someone. So you took it out on the children. I’m no sociologist, but I can see that much.
Their relationship, while it may have glittered and gleamed at first, went steadily downhill for three years. It got to the point that Glitter couldn’t even share the same planet with his spouse. But he loved the child and had even come to think of her as his own. Try telling that to a court of law. Modern justiprudence doesn’t even recognize the concept of fatherhood, any more than it would recognize the divine right of kings. Glitter didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. The child belonged to Gleam.
But my mother (foster mother, I couldn’t yet bring myself to say father) found a compromise. There was no use mourning the fact that he couldn’t take Jubilant with him. He had to accept that. But he could take a piece of her. That was me. So he moved to Mercury with the cloned child, changed his sex, and brought me up to adulthood, never saying a word about First Principles.
I was calming down as I heard all this, but it was certainly a revelation. I was full of questions, and for the time, survival was forgotten.
“No, Dorothy isn’t a member of the church any longer. That was one of the causes of the split. As far as I know, Gleam is the only member today. It didn’t last very long. The couples that formed the church pretty much tore each other apart in marital strife. That was why the court granted my divorce; Gleam kept trying to force her religion on me, and when I told my friends about it, they laughed at me. I didn’t want that, even at age ten, and told the court I thought my mother was crazy. The court agreed.”
“So ... so Dorothy hasn’t had her one child yet. Do you think she can still have one? What are the legalities of that?”
“Pretty cut-and-dried, according to Dorothy. The judges don’t like it, but it’s her birthright, and they can’t deny it. She managed to get permission to have you grown because of a loophole in the law, since she was going to Mercury and would be out of the jurisdiction of the Lunar courts. The loophole was closed shortly after you left. So you and I are pretty unique. What do you think about that?”
“I don’t know. I think I’d rather have a normal family. What do I say to Dorothy now?”
She hugged me, and I loved her for that. I was feeling young and alone. Her story was still settling in, and I was afraid of what my reaction might be when I digested it to its conclusion.
“I wouldn’t tell her anything. Why should you? She’ll probably get around to telling you before you leave for the cometary zone, but if she doesn’t, what of it? What does it matter? Hasn’t she been a mother to you? Do you have any complaints? Is the biological fact of motherhood all that important? I think not. I think love is more important, and I can see that was there.”
“But she’s my father! How do I relate to that?”
“Don’t even try. I suspect that fathers loved their children in pretty much the same way mothers did, back when fatherhood was more than just insemination.”
“Maybe you’re right. I think you’re right.” She held me close in the dark.
“Of course I’m right.”
Three hours later, there was a rumble and the violet glow surrounded us again.
* * * *
We walked into the sunlight hand in hand. The rescue crew was there to meet us, grinning and patting us on the back. They filled our tanks, and we enjoyed the luxury of wasting oxygen to drive away the sweat.
“How bad was it?” I asked the rescue boss.
“Medium-sized. You two are some of the last to be dug out. Did you have a hard time in there?”
I looked at Jubilant, who acted as though she had just been resurrected from the dead, grinning like a maniac. I thought about it.
“No. No trouble.”
We climbed the rocky slope, and I looked back. The quake had dumped several tons of rock into quicksilver gully. Worse still, the natural dam at the lower end had been destroyed. Most of the mercury had drained out into the broader valley below. It was clear that the quicksilver grotto would never be the magic place it had been in my youth. That was a sad thing. I had loved it, and it seemed that I was leaving a lot behind me down there.
I turned my back on it and walked down toward the house and Dorothy.